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'Winter occurs once a year, more often than not
between fall and spring....
It is actually caused when the Earth
is knocked out of its orbit and travels to the rim of the solar
system past Pluto where it is pretty cold, like almost absolute
zero (which is really cold, almost as cold as in Alaska).... In
various nordic regions of the planet, like Canada, Finland, Russia
and Zimbabwe, small white objects have the annoying tendency to
fall from the sky, in replacement of rain.'
It's amazing how literarily active
some people are, and how they find time to write voluntary entries
for popular internet encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. But it's even
more astonishing that the internet includes extensive mock worlds,
such as uncyclopedia.org. Look up 'winter', and you'll find the
above definition (which, I confess, amused me slightly one cold
morning).
I'm thinking about winter because,
as I write this, 'real' winter has finally arrived in Helsinki.
As 2006 gave way to 2007, an impassioned debate about global warming
coincided with a mild and snowless early winter.
Richard II, 'the son of York', was
to melt away the trials and tribulations of the winter like the
sun. A Google search turns up 1.2 million results for the quote:
it is applied to everything from football, cattle-raising, Iraq
and Palestine to the British Labour party and the state of petrol
prices. Since Shakespeare, winters have always been, from some perspective,
'of discontent'.
*
I'm also thinking about winter because it crops
up so much in this issue of Books from Finland: Toivo Pekkanen's
short story, 'The faraway island' (see page 35), depicts two schoolboys
dreaming of an island that sparkles in the distance with a million
diamonds in the winter sun like a frozen Shangri-la.
Many of the photographs by Petteri
Kokkonen (see page 43, and the cover of this issue) emphasise the
whiteness of winter and the blackness of dogs. The writer and keen
gardener Mari Mörö philosophises in her frozen realm (see
page 39), where her numerous subjects hibernate. And in Lapland,
winter is long; in the first in a series of articles, the literary
scholar Janna Kantola sets out to discover what the Sámi
literature is now like (see page 48).
*
The internet, full of both hogwash and information,
interests the columnist Jyrki Lehtola (see page 50) as a new forum
for free people: not without irony, he explores the pros and cons
of the growing number of myriad blogs.
Surfing on the net today, I found
out that in the United States young people aged between 15 and 24
spend eight minutes daily reading (and anything readable in printed
form counts), whereas more than three hours are consumed by the
television and computer.
I quite like this definition of literacy
(as drafted by UNESCO): 'the ability to identify, understand, interpret,
create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials
associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum
of learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals,
to develop his or her knowledge and potential, and to participate
fully in the wider society.' It seems to contain everything that
matters in human communication.
Since illiteracy hasn't ceased to
be a serious problem in the world, those eight minutes appear somewhat
dismaying.
According to Reading at Risk: A
Survey of Literary Reading in America (a report by the National
Endowment for the Arts, 2004), less than half of all Americans read
literature (any work of literature - even one poem — of any
quality during the past 12 months counts). Reading affects lifestyle:
literary readers are much more likely to be involved in cultural,
sports and volunteer activities than non-readers.
Hmmm... it is literary reading, then,
in particular, that 'enables us to participate more fully in the
wider society'.
*
The sun! The sun!.... The crocuses have flowered
and one / snowdrop. The bear rages in the forest, writes the
poet and psychiatrist Claes Andersson (see page 80). Having realised
that you cannot get rid of writer's block by trying, he found the
poem he was seeking to write. By the time this issue of Books
from Finland falls through your letterbox, it will (in the northern
hemisphere) be spring. Welcome, readers old and new: the Books
from Finland team is looking forward to offering you interesting
minutes, or even hours, of reading good literature in the year to
come.
Soila Lehtonen
Editor-in-Chief
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